“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling went scorched earth on Emma Watson on Monday in reaction to a rather benign comment on their differences when it comes to transgender rights.
Rowling took to X to “make a couple of points” regarding recent comments recently made by Watson, who played Hermione Granger in the film adaptations of Rowling’s books.
Watson expressed support for trans people after Rowling started supporting anti-trans policies in the U.K. in June 2020, but said in a recent interview that she doesn’t think having different views from Rowling on some issues means that she can’t “treasure Jo and the person that I had personal experiences with.”
She added: “I will never believe that one negates the other and that my experience of that person, I don’t get to keep and cherish.”
Watson also said that she hopes “people who don’t agree with my opinion will love me, and I hope I can keep loving people who I don’t necessarily share the same opinion with.”
Casual readers might look at Watson’s comment as a suggestion that she and Rowling can agree to disagree, but Rowling wasn’t having it.
Instead, she wrote a nearly 700-word screed against Watson, where she called the actor “ignorant,” among other things.
Rowling insisted she’s not “owed eternal agreement from any actor who once played a character” she created, and said that Watson and her co-stars ”have every right to embrace gender identity ideology” and she “wouldn’t want to see any of them threatened with loss of work, or violence, or death, because of them.”
However, she said that both Watson and series star Daniel Radcliffe “have both made it clear over the last few years that they think our former professional association gives them a particular right — nay, obligation — to critique me and my views in public.”
She griped: “Years after they finished acting in Potter, they continue to assume the role of de facto spokespeople for the world I created.”
Rowling claimed that “when you’ve known people since they were ten years old it’s hard to shake a certain protectiveness,” and admitted that “until quite recently, I hadn’t managed to throw off the memory of children who needed to be gently coaxed through their dialogue in a big scary film studio.”
The author also said she has “repeatedly declined invitations from journalists to comment on Emma specifically,” mainly because she “didn’t want her to be hounded as the result of anything I said.”
Rowling then said that the millions Watson earned making the “Potter” films have kept her from experiencing adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame.
“Emma has so little experience of real life she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is. She’ll never need a homeless shelter. She’s never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward. I’d be astounded if she’s been in a high street changing room since childhood,” Rowling wrote. “Her ‘public bathroom’ is single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door.”
Rowling then asked rhetorically if Watson has “had to strip off in a newly mixed-sex changing room at a council-run swimming pool? Is she ever likely to need a state-run rape crisis centre that refuses to guarantee an all-female service? To find herself sharing a prison cell with a male rapist who’s identified into the women’s prison?”
The author then dug her claws in deeper.
“I wasn’t a multimillionaire at fourteen. I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous,” she said. “I therefore understand from my own life experience what the trashing of women’s rights in which Emma has so enthusiastically participated means to women and girls without her privileges.”
Rowling then said that the “greatest irony” is that “had Emma not decided in her most recent interview to declare that she loves and treasures me … I might never have been this honest.”
She then finished her post by noting that while Watson has the right to disagree with her, “adults can’t expect to cosy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend’s assassination, then assert their right to the former friend’s love, as though the friend was in fact their mother.”
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